Activist Librarians

- An activist librarian goes out, collects the information, and packages it for the people, says Esther Obachi from Kenya Library Association. She is one of the lecturers at the 3-day workshop for Tanzanian librarians in Dar es Salaam 3-5 January. Today we shall study Wikis and Blogs in the computer lab of the Dar es Salaam university, and guess who is going to give the presentation.

We are all preparing for the World Social Forum in Nairobi 20-25 January, 2007. The librarians are going to document it and repackage it for dissemination to the people. About one thousand activities (events, conferences, workshops etc.) have already been registered by the movements, associations and networks participating in the WSF. The list of these activities and events are available in 5 databases on the web at www.wsf2007.org. The databases are presented in Excel sheets.

I am bad at Excel sheets, but my Open Office software can at least open and handle them.

Mr Leonard Ngowo from the public library in Morogoro (Tanzania) helped me to prepare printouts from the Excel sheets for our workshop.

Zanzibar

After the 3-day workshop in Dar es Salaam, we decide to pay a visit to Zanzibar. Getrude, one of the Tanzanian librarians, accepts to be our guide. She turns up promptly at six on Saturday morning, and we are off to the port which is crowded with Zanzibaris and tourists waiting to embark on one of the morning ferries.

Adam's Exchange near the port of Zanzibar.

On our way from the Palace of the Omani Sultans to the Bububu beach, we pass by the library in the Old Zanzibar Stone Town. The library is full of visitors who read the books and the newspapers. Some of them, obviously students, take notes. This is the only point of activity of Zanzibar Library Services, which started 1989 with support from the Japanese Embassy, says Chief librarian Hamid Rajabu Juma. The Zanzibar islands have a population of about one million.

Mgani Said and Maryam Mohammed at their desk, serving one of the 5700
registered users of Zanzibar Library Services.
Behind: head librarian Hamid Rajabu Juma.
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Consulting my own traveller's library, I note that in 1964 "armed African gangs in Zanzibar incited an uprising against the Arab ruling elite, forcing the Sultan to flee in his yacht. Some 5,000 Arabs were killed, thousands more interned, their houses, property and possessions seized at will. A revolutionary council, led by Abeid Karume, appealed for assistance from China, the Soviet Union and East Germany. Hundreds of communist technicians duly arrived, prompting Western fears that the island might become another 'Cuba'. On mainland Tanganyika, Nyerere, worried by the prospect of Zanzibar being drawn directly into the Cold War and anxious to exert a moderating influence, proposed a union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The union was subsequently named Tanzania" (quoted from Meredith, Martin: The State of Africa, Simon & Schuster 2005, p. 176. According to Bob Geldof, "you cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book". Which is an exaggeration, of course.)

On the ferry back from Zanzibar to the mainland are many elders with
children who return to school after New Year.

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On Sunday, I flew from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi in the company of Rosemary and Esther.

Hoperaisers of Korogocho

The two young men from Korogocho showed up punctually. I gave them the guitar. They played and singed. They are good singers. Real good. Therefore I might as well mention their names so that you can recognize them when you hear them later. Daniel Onyango is 19, Isaiah Kimani 18. There are other members of their band also, whom I have not yet heard singing or playing. "Hoperaisers" is the name of the band. They are about to release a CD, their first, I assume. "These are voices from the South", and "Wake up Kenyans", for instance, are nice new songs they have made. I believe the WSF participants will appreciate. The latter is in Swahili. "Another World is Possible", another of their songs, reminds me of "We shall Overcome".
The Hoperaisers in the picture here, with Isaiah (holding guitar) and Daniel (on his left).

We took off to Korogocho in a taxi. I asked Daniel to enumerate the slums of Nairobi. Here are some names to start with: Kiambio (we pass that on our way), Citycotton (we pass that one, too), Mathare (with perhaps half a million inhabitants), Kibera (the biggest: population ca 1 million; its roofs are seen from the way to the national park), Mukuru, Kawangware, Kangemi, Huruma, Kayole, Soweto (yes, another Soweto, not the same as in S.A.) and Mailisaba. There are also new slums which still lack names, like the one you see here in the photo.

There are many stories to be told from Korogocho. In fact, some 150.000 people live there, close to a dump site. The dump site looks like dump sites look, but it is enormous, the biggest of Nairobi. I will not show pictures of it. Between Korogocho and the actual smoking and stinking pile of dump is a nicer looking little valley where "many people have died" (Daniel), sinking into the old quarry (the "valley" has sometimes been a stone quarry). So the dump is, in its own way, dominating the landscape, which, in principle is beautiful. The dump kills people in Korogocho, of course, causing disease and cancer.

Korogocho, by the way, is not very far from the Moi sports stadium of Kasarani, the main venue of the World Social Forum. What do the people in Korogocho think about the WSF? I don't know much about that, but at least there are groups which prepare actively and visibly for it. Hoperaisers is one of these groups, for sure. "Koch-FM", the emerging Community radio station, is another (Koch = Korogocho). Geoffrey K Muriitki tells me all about it in his container, refurbished into radio studio. If all goes well Koth-FM goes live on Sunday. But they have problems with the transmitter.. They have fighted hard with the government officials last year over the license. At one point they had to arrange a demonstration within the government office. Finally they got permission to send on bandwith 99.9. Koch-Fm hopes to reach some 800.000 listeners, and it will not only send radio programs. It will also go out to the various parts of Korogocho (there are 9 "groups", that is, districts) to arrange discussions: fight drugs, educate on HIV, for isntance. a CR station can run only 2 ads per day, so it will not be a commercial radio. The Norwegian church and "Open Society" has assisted with the equipment.
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Over the "entrance" to Korogocho, already, hangs a big banderolle which tells about the WSF and the Marathon from Korogocho to the city center (ca 14 km) which will take place on the last, closing, day of the WSF. The aid organisations of the churches are active here, not least the Catholic Church (St. John) which has done social work here since 30 years, building a school, a library, and the audience where Hoperaisers gave a concert the day before our tour (ca 5.000 yong attended, they say). Father Daniele Moschetti, an impressive figure with a wooden crucifix on his chest, wishes me "welcome to us". (Checkout: www.korogocho.org
)

After the concert of the Hoperaisers, a stand has come up, where people can register for participation in the World Social Forum. How will it be to participate in the WSF? Will the young slum-dwellers from Korogocho find the researchers and activists who have registered so many activities for the WSF? The "final draft" of the programme of the WSF was released at http://www.wsf2007.org yesterday. The venues and times are not yet in that draft. Intersting to see how people will find each others and their activities. Here, to end with, a picture of the registration in Korogocho

What World Social Forum Aims At

(Nairobi 20 January 2007) . The opening ceremony of WSF 2007 starts today at 14 pm in the Uhuru Park of Nairobi. This morning, the Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation printed my article (below), in which I shortly describe the project I am involved in here, and give some views about the social forum process.

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Manuscript:

What is the World Social
Forum aiming at?The
World Social Forum is not only the world’s biggest jamboree, which occurs each
or every second year in Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Nairobi, or another center of the
Global South. The
social forum is a form of intellectual and political activity, which resembles
that of the educational institutions and the libraries. These are supposed to
be, and sometimes they actually are, ‘open spaces’.

Thus one
of the nine thematic terrains chosen for the Nairobi WSF 20-25 January is:
“Building a world of peace, justice, ethics and respect for diverse
spiritualities”. This could also be the explicit goal of a university or a
library.

The
social forum is going on at many levels: local, national, regional, and
“world”. It is a process, but it is not yet an institution. Should the social
forum strive to establish itself as one of society’s lasting institutions?

The
answer must be yes. The social forums aim at building a global society that
could not materialize earlier, because the conditions for its existence were
lacking. World social forums are not possible without world communications. The
Internet, yet another ‘open space’ at our disposal, is the ultimate proof, but
also a prime condition, of the on-going globalization of human society.

But we
are not yet living in the global society. Imperialism and war are still the
words of the day, as we can see in Iraq. Not to speak about the lack of respect
for diverse spiritualities. A hundred
thousand WSF participants, or a million people in the various social forums
around the world, might be impressive numbers, but they are far from
sufficient. How to make the social forums grow and extend? What should the
Nairobi WSF, for instance, be aiming at?

The
openness of the ‘open space’ is informational. It means a capacity to receive
and to deliver the social information, which contains the truths and the
solutions arrived at together. The social truths and solutions must always be
questioned and discussed; they are indeed always questionable and disputable.
To guarantee the continuity of the form the social forum was given is, as Chico
Whitaker (one of its founders) has said, perhaps the biggest challenge ahead of
the WSF.

Yet more
is needed: the social forum must achieve new mergers with those other ‘open
spaces’ which were already mentioned above: the educational institutions, the
libraries and the Internet. A much broader engagement of the researchers, the
librarians and the teachers than what we have seen so far is needed if the
social forums are to succeed in their aim to build global society. The
journalists, too, must become part of the embryonic global society of which the
social forum is the bearer.

Other
key professional groups in the vast field of ‘information’, such as the
developers of free and open software for computers, should also be mentioned.

One
example of what is already being done in order to put this theory into practice
is the pilot project of the East African Librarians.

Since a
first 3-days ‘training the trainers’ workshop in Nairobi 2006, East African
librarians are preparing for participation in the WSF, both as citizens and as
information specialists. They want to start a documenting of the information
that the hundreds of conferences and workshops of the social forum are
producing, in order to preserve it and
present it in their libraries. And then the librarians intend to repackage and
disseminate all this information for the use of different groups, including the
marginalized and the information-poor.

Kenya
Library Association has set up a webserver at the Kenya Educational Network
(Kenet) to become the database of this pilot project. Like the Wikipedia, the
server allows the readers to edit and amend the existing information and to
create new pages. The WSF participants themselves, individuals as well as
organizations, are invited to write about themselves, their projects, and their
daily agendas during the Nairobi WSF. The webserver is found at www.wsflibrary.org.

This
‘information activism’ on the part of the librarians can also be understood as
mobilization against the prevailing trends in the world economy and politics,
which threaten the public library with extinction. The library is a public
service, but according to the present power-holders, the public services should
be privatized, that is, grabbed by capitalists. The library delivers as much
information as possible to as many as possible without delay, and at an
affordable fee, or gratis, yet current doctrine on ‘intellectual property’
prescribes that all information should be owned and sold on ‘the information
market’. These neo-liberal (actually monopolistic) tenets form the essence of
the general agreement on trade in services (GATS) and the agreement on tradable
intellectual property rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The WSF
aims at exposing and burying imperialism and market fundamentalism and to lay
the foundations of world public finances for world public services, including
the world’s public library.
Mikael Book

Mr.
Book, 59, lives in Finland and is a member of the Network Institute for Global
Democratization (NIGD), a group of researchers, which is active in the World
Social Forum. During January 2007 he works in Nairobi as a resource person in
the pilot project on “Documenting of the WSF” of the East African Librarians. More
information on the project is found via www.wsflibrary.org.